Then All Things Are Permitted

Following the recent Supreme Court rulings dealing with "gay marriage", a couple of my more liberal acquaintances were enthusiastically posting pictures from gay pride parades. These put me in mind of this old Onion piece, one of those which treads such a delicate line between satire and commentary that you wonder a bit what the author's object was in writing it.

Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years

The mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, a hard-won civil-rights victory gained through decades of struggle against prejudice and discrimination, was set back at least 50 years Saturday in the wake of the annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade.

"I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."

The parade, organized by the Los Angeles Gay And Lesbian And Bisexual And Transvestite And Transgender Alliance (LAGALABATATA), was intended to "promote acceptance, tolerance, and equality for the city's gay community." Just the opposite, however, was accomplished, as the event confirmed the worst fears of thousands of non-gay spectators, cementing in their minds a debauched and distorted image of gay life straight out of the most virulent right-wing hate literature.

The piece itself contains a "commentary from expert" explanation which covers the rationalization that I've heard given in real life by gay pride supporters who are nonetheless willing to sheepishly admit, "well, yeah, I guess it does get a bit over the top":

Dr. Henry Thorne, a New York University history professor who has written several books about the gay-rights movement, explained the misunderstanding.

"After centuries of oppression as an 'invisible' segment of society, gays, emboldened by the 1969 Stonewall uprising, took to the streets in the early '70s with an 'in-your-face' attitude. Confronting the worst prejudices of a world that didn't accept them, they fought back against these prejudices with exaggeration and parody, reclaiming their enemies' worst stereotypes about them and turning them into symbols of gay pride," Thorne said. "Thirty years later, gays have won far greater acceptance in the world at large, but they keep doing this stuff anyway."

"Mostly, I think, because it's really fun," Thorne added.

The Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, Thorne noted, is part of a decades-old gay-rights tradition. But, for mainstream heterosexuals unfamiliar with irony and the reclamation of stereotypes for the purpose of exploding them, the parade resembled an invasion of grotesque outer-space mutants, bent on the destruction of the human race.

Here again we have some of the modern reliance on irony without regard to whether what you're doing is actually good. I think there's something else going on here as well, however.

When trying to make-nice to conservatives, proponents of "same sex marriage" tend to emphasize it as a way of enshrining commitment and sexual morality. However, while this tends to suggest that same sex relationships should have the same moral obligations and boundaries as traditional ones, in practice I have never known anyone who believes that same sex marriages are moral from a Christian point of view, and yet holds that sex outside of marriage (and a host of other, related sexual issues) is definitely wrong. I'm sure that a few such people do exist, but in general even the "conservative" supporters of same sex marriage tend to have adopted a significantly loosened idea of overall sexual morality: Sex is very much what you make of it. Different people have different expectations. The key thing is that everything be consensual and that people never betray the commitments they make, whatever those may be.

This Atlantic piece (which from what I can tell is written from what it terms the progressive point of view on sex) argues that sexual traditionalists and progressives in our culture have fundamentally different ideas about what sex is and what it's for.

Trad View:

As religious conservatives see it, the great mistake we make when we masturbate is to claim our sexuality as ours alone. All sexual activity must be about "mutual self-giving" between a husband and a wife, the church claims, arguing that masturbation is "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."

Prog View:

In The Ethical Slut, perhaps the best-known "catechism" of progressive sexual morality, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy make the case that "the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable, but it does not complete anybody." Masturbation matters, they argue, not merely because it helps you learn what you want sexually from a partner, but because it helps bring "your locus of control into yourself."

Especially given the source, this struck me as surprisingly perceptive. Moreover, it suggests that if one's sexuality is fundamentally one's own, defined by oneself and limited only by the commitments one makes oneself, there's nothing necessarily wrong in engaging in "depraved" expressions of sexuality, whether ironically or seriously.

Newsflash: Being a Subject Different From Subjecting

It is, perhaps, one of the perennial temptations of the apologist to get too clever by half, to allow the phrase to defeat the argument. A particularly dangerous tactic in this regard is the tactic of reversal, in which the apologist takes the accusation leveled at him and replies, "Why yes I do. And that's a good thing!" Marc Barnes of the Patheos blog Bad Catholic finds himself floundering in this rhetorical tar pit in a recent post in which he attempt to fend off the accusation that traditional morality seeks to "enslave" women, subjugate them, make war on them, etc. He writes:

The liturgical chants and battle-cries accompanying and bemoaning the war on women are true in an erotic context.

The man who loves does wish to “control a woman’s body,” with an ardor rivaled only by his desire for the beloved to control his own. For what on earth is the sexual act, if not an attempt to control the body of the beloved? This is obvious in the physical sense, as the lover tries to “control” the other’s body into experiencing ecstasy, but it is also true when considering the nature of sex itself: If sex is the ultimate physical expression of erotic love, and love is desiring the good of the beloved, than sex — in its fullest — is the physical attempt to bring the beloved to his or her ultimate good, and thus an obvious attempt to control.

Similarly, the lover does desire a “slavery for women,” and for one woman in particular, a desire overwhelmed only by his desire to be enslaved by her.

Now, maybe I'm just a stodgy old married guy, but I don't actually think that slavery is a very good analogy for love. But let's leave that aside for a moment and accept the standard poetic conceit. Here's the problem: There's a big difference between offering yourself as a slave to someone and wanting them to do the same to you, and wanting to enslave someone. It's the difference between gift and domination. A relationship could work well in which each person wishes to serve the other's every desire: in which, according to the chosen metaphor, each person is a slave to the other. But that only works if they both want to be the slave. If, in any relationship, one or both members want to be the master while the other is the slave, you have a recipe for strife and unhappiness in abundance, not to mention a fair amount of cruelty.

This, really, is the problem with the metaphor. It's all very well for the poet to say, "I want to be your slave," but if his beloved takes him up on the offer by behaving like a slave owner, the poet is going to be dreadfully unhappy. (Which, come to that, brings us to another whole genre of often tiresome poetry.) Even if we accept the metaphor of wanting to be a slave to the beloved, a loving relationship is one in which each wants to be a slave to the other, but neither wants to enslave the other. Being a slave is not the same as enslaving, it's the opposite.

The same problem comes with the attempt to turn "control a woman's body" into a positive. Sex in which both man and woman strive to control each other's bodies is not going to work out well. In seeking to "control" one seeks to make the other do what one wants. If we assume that the lover wants his beloved to get what she wants (say, sexual release) one might assume this would work out to the same thing. But in actual interactions between people "I want to make you do what you want" is very different from "I want to give you what you want".

The inversion and capture method of apologetics is appealing in its cleverness, but the fact is that there are a lot of expressions that you really won't want to capture and make your own, indeed that you can't make your own without expressing your beliefs as something rather distasteful. In this case, terms like "control a woman's body", "enslave women" and "war on women" are not terms that Christians should seek to adopt and turn to positive meaning. It doesn't come off as some clever turn of phrase that makes one appreciate Christian love and a Christian understanding of sexuality in a new light. It just comes off as too clever by half and makes Christian morality sound vaguely nasty.

NFP: Not Just Natural Birth Control

If you think you've found the key to a better life, the most natural thing in the world is to want to rush out and convince everyone else to do likewise. We want to shout from the rooftops, "Hey! Better life to be found here! You can too!" As someone who finds significant meaning and happiness in the Catholic understanding of sexuality and prohibition of contraception, this view (and the approach to natural family planning that springs from it) is indeed something that I think other need to hear -- but as a result it's doubly frustrating when it seems like it's being "sold" wrong.

This is why my teeth went a little on edge when I ran into what ought to have been a very encouraging article to see in the Washington Post detailing the efforts of young and faithful Catholic women to re-explain the Church's teachings on contraception to the modern world. Here's the section that threw me off:

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.

“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

Now, before I go any further, let me say that my limited experience of dealing with interviews is that what you say and the way you come off in the article are often very, very different. So I don't want to suggest that McGuire was misrepresenting NFP. It may well be that the WaPo writer talked to her for a long time, wrote up the article in good faith, yet ended up infusing it with an attitude that's just -- off.  (And indeed, I see that Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary (quoted elsewhere in the article) feels like what came across in the article is not exactly what she was trying to convey.)

That said, I think the message that the article conveys is problematic in that it simply doesn't reflect all that accurately what it's like using NFP, and when your advertising message doesn't fit the reality of your "product", user dissatisfaction is sure to follow. Emily Stimpson covers this well in a post titled Truth in Adverstising:

Let me be clear: I think it’s all sorts of great when young, attractive, faithful women talk to The Washington Post about contraception and NFP. And I totally get the importance of marketing and branding in this media age. We want people to know that NFP is not your grandmother’s rhythm method: It actually works. Nor is it your mother’s birth control pill: It doesn’t give you cancer or diminish your sex drive.

So what unsettles me?

Me, I guess. Me and my 11:45 a.m. battle with the brownie.

Like passing up turtle brownies, NFP requires self-control, temperance, and prudence. Only, it requires a heck of a lot more of each—more self-control, more temperance, more prudence, plus a ready knowledge of how to make chastity within marriage work. (I may be single, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that. Besides, I live in Steubenville, and my girlfriends talk about NFP as much as my sister’s friends talk about “Jersey Shore.” So…a lot.)

Regardless, temperance, prudence, and chastity aren’t virtues most people possess in spades anymore. Our culture, where instant gratification and over-indulgence are the norm, has seen to that.

At the same time, rejecting contraception in general requires trust—trust in God’s will and God’s provision. It requires generosity—a willingness to put others needs before our own. It requires a spirit of poverty—detachment from the extras our culture says are essentials. And it requires a heart that delights in pictures of fat smiling babies, that believes babies are precious gifts from God, not a reason to run for the hills.

Basically, it requires that we be everything our culture has programmed us not to be. That’s why NFP is a challenge for the most faithful couples I know, let alone those decidedly less faithful. Few are able to use it to space births with the same precision the manuals promise. Not because the methods don’t work. But rather because wills are weak and temptation is tempting. If a tiny tasty brownie can almost fell us, what can love and desire do?

Does that make NFP impossible or unrealistic? Of course not. Nevertheless, we should remain realistic about the fruit better branding can yield. We also should be realistic as we go about that branding.

No matter how savvy our marketing may be, NFP will remain a radical, counter-cultural choice, at least for the foreseeable future, because it asks…no, it demands that we reject our cultural programming and embrace a different way of thinking. Not simply about sex, but about everything: children, family, marriage, finances, work, God, desire, love, life’s purpose, life’s meaning, human freedom, the Divine Will, suffering, sacrifice. Again, everything.

NFP is not Catholic birth control. It’s the Catholic world view…lived out in the bedroom. [emphasis added]

The corrective is not some sort of bitter, "Oh I hate NFP. We can never have sex when we want to, half our kids were 'unplanned' and I never even feel like it during the infertile times, but it builds character, dammit, and it's about time people learned that marriage isn't all about self indulgence." That's not going to win any converts, and unless you allow yourself to be completely taken over by resentment (at which point people are able to make even unloading the dishwasher into some sort of Bataan death march of marital suffering) it's not even true. But living the NFP lifestyle -- which can be most briefly summed up as understanding that if one doesn't want to get pregnant at the moment, one is going to have to not have sex on some occasions when one would really like to -- takes effort and commitment. If you go into it with the idea, "all I want is to not have a baby right now" or even "all I want to do is control my fertility without using chemicals" it's going to seem pretty onerous.

With a difficult and commitment heavy process, success and satisfaction depend on actually learning to embrace the process itself, not just the goals. The people I know who look seriously fit are not the ones who hate exercising and eating well, but like to look good and so struggle through. Almost no one is able to put that much consistent effort into something he doesn't actually want to do. Success in that area comes from finding an athletic activity one can like and working up to the point where one actually wants to engage in it. That doesn't mean it isn't hard. But it's something hard that you want to do.

Using NFP is rewarding. It trains spouses into greater consideration for each other, a more communicative and other-focused sexuality, and a greater appreciation of the way that their love for each other ties intimately together with their parenthood. But it's no more a natural form of birth control than picking up a loaf of "organic" bread at Wal-Mart is the same as farming.

How Far Can We Go?

In my days as a young unmarried Catholic, I often suffered through chastity talks or had dating manuals pressed on me. The Protestant dating manuals (or, more accurately, not-dating, since apparently dating is right out in those circles, to be replaced by the nebulous concept of "courtship") were painfully earnest in their descriptions of hypothetical couples who were keeping their relationships 99.44% pure by following strict rules of behavior. Chastity talks were even more painful because you had to be there in person, squirming in your folding chair and wishing the floor would swallow you as the speaker hemmed and hawed, or, even worse, was wildly enthusiastic for Purity! There seemed to be no happy medium between  either rigid guidelines that seemed designed to minimize contact between a couple, or hazy exhortations to purity that gave one no practical guidance in the matter of a relationship rooted in reality.

After the discussion following this post about the proper level of physical interaction before marriage, Darwin ordered a book on the subject by Brett Salkeld, a fellow blogger and acquaintance. Brett and his co-author Leah Perrault know this sad scene all too well, and they have written a refreshing remedy and valuable resource, How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating.

Here are two famous answers to the question "How far can we go?"

• Keep both feet on the floor.

• Asking "How far can we go?" is like taking your girlfriend or boyfriend in your arms, walking to the edge of a cliff, and asking, "How close can I get to the edge?"

We had to write this book because we think both these answers are unsatisfactory. We think we can do better. The first answer is very practical, but anyone with a little imagination can get around it. In trying to set out an easy-to-follow guideline for Catholic couples, it ignores the question of Christian formation. It says that physical intimacy is only about how you act, and has no connection to the kind of person you are called to become.  

The second answer is much more dangerous. The foundation of the metaphor it uses is that sex is roughly equivalent to suicide! In other words, sex is dangerous and sinful. Any advance in physical intimacy is just getting you closer and closer to the edge of the cliff. When we give answers like this it is no wonder the world thinks the Church is down on sex! 

...One of the reasons that Christian books on sex and dating have given a misleading view about sexuality is that they ignore the essential communicative aspect of sexuality. Sexual sin is presented as crossing some vague boundary partway up an imaginary list of increasingly intimate physical acts. But, in the context of physical intimacy, sin isn't crossing an arbitrary line. Sexual sin is about using your body to lie to your partner (and probably yourself) about the nature of your relationship. There need to be one or two clear lines about what is appropriate for unmarried people, but those lines are not drawn to keep people from acts that impure in and of themselves. They are drawn to keep people from lying with the language of their bodies. This book, then, is not primarily about which acts are and are not permissible. This book is about learning to speak the truth with your body.

One thing I really appreciate here is that Salkeld and Perrault have a respect for their young audience, and don't treat the question "How far can we go?" as an attempt to find out how much whoopie one can get away with, but an honest query about what is right and appropriate at any point in a relationship. (I snickered out loud at their description of a youth group leader who answers this question from a young couple by saying, "I'll let you in on a little secret. Your relationship will do much better if, instead, you ask yourselves how pure you can be." If you haven't heard twaddle like that, you haven't been around the Authentically Catholic! youth scene much.) They emphasize from the start that their model of dating "presumes that those who use it are sincerely trying to live holy lives. If you're hoping to find loopholes so you can get away with as much as possible and still say you're following Catholic rules, this model isn't for you."

Just what is this model? It relies on honestly answering the question "How much of myself does God want me to give to this other person?"

Sex is not a shortcut to intimacy! If you want to have sex but don't want to get married, you need to look at your reason for not getting married. If it's not a very good reason [the financial demands of a big wedding being an earlier example], work through it and then get married. If it's a good reason, it's probably a good reason not to have sex. Sex speaks a profound language of the body that is both a sign and a source of the kidn of unity that married people share. If you're not ready for marriage, then you're simply not ready for the demands of a relationship that includes sex.  

If you understand our explanation of the Church's teaching on premarital sex, you should be able to follow our dating model. It works on exactly the same principle; physical gifts of self ought to reflect our self-giving in other areas of a relationship.

The dating model the authors set forth is firmly rooted in responsibility and free will: not a "one-size-fits-all" set of rules (because every person and every relationship is unique), but guidelines for discerning at each step of a relationship the appropriate levels of not just physical intimacy, but spiritual, intellectual, social, and emotional intimacy All of these are often bound up with one another because humans are bodies and souls -- what effects one must effect the other. One of the most common-sense statements in the book is that intimacy needs to grow gradually over time, and the authors provide examples of couples at different stages of life and relationship -- high school students, couples in college, working college graduates, and high-powered career men and women -- to show how this discernment can play out in various ways. There's a fun set of graphs that examine how all forms of intimacy progress over the course of the journey from perfect strangers to spouses. The authors aren't shy about expressing the Church's teachings against common sexual pitfalls such as pornography and masturbation, and clearly explain the reasons for these teachings. They are unequivocal on the Church's teaching against premarital sex and activities that try to mimic the effects of sex, and devote the last chapters of the book to marriage and NFP.

I absolutely recommend this book -- I really think it's one of the best resources I've encountered for an honest and balanced treatment of what it means to be a faithful Catholic moving toward marriage. For what it's worth, I find the authors' discussion of sexuality and intimacy in relationships to be very true to Darwin's and my experience of having a real and intense and Catholic unmarried relationship while trying to steer a good course between prudery and prurience. This is the book I'll give to my own children to read when they're old enough for such discussions, and I can give no higher praise than that.

UPDATE: You can hear more about Brett and Leah's approach and speaking work at their website: http://www.howfarcanwego.com

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's a video of Brett Salkeld and Leah Perrault discussing "How Far Can We Go?"

Growing Into Morality

Last night I started reading Heather King's Redeemed, her conversion story, which picks up after Parched, the chronicle of her spiral into and final escape from alcoholism. (I read Parched a couple weeks ago and greatly enjoyed it, if that's the right term for a brilliantly written if at times harrowing memoir.)

One of the things that struck me in reading King's account of her conversion is the way in which she describes coming to understand and agree with Catholic moral teaching. She describes how during her time as an alcoholic she had engaged in increasingly promiscuous sex (until her drinking became so single-minded that even sex would have got in the way), taken birth control, had multiple abortions, etc., and how as she was drawn to the Church she came to see how empty and destructive these had been, and how true the Catholic understanding of these topics now seemed to her.

Drama always centers around change, and reading about Heather King's change on these topics both rings true and makes for dramatic reading. Yet it was also striking me how alien this line of discovery was to my own experience growing into an adult Catholic moral sense (something which still requires a certain kind of conversion, or at least adoption.) Both because of her own years away from any kind of religious belief, and perhaps also because she's describing her experience for an audience which is not specifically religious (Redeemed is out from Viking Press), King's growing understanding of morality during her adult conversion is very different from the experience I look back on as I grew from a youthful understanding to an adult one while living within the Catholic sub-culture.

Like most children brought up with a strong moral code, my earliest sense of morality was strictly one of heroes and villains. Bad things were done by bad people, and good people, nice people that you knew, clearly didn't do bad things.

Such illusions cannot last long, and so the next stage was a tribal one. People like us -- people who were Catholic and went to mass and believed in God and such, followed a moral code, and while all people sin, and so one could expect the petty lies and meannesses and betrayals as much in one's on circle as elsewhere, there we things we just didn't do unless we did so in total rejection of all that was good and right. People who did not belong to the tribe, of course, did not know or accept these rules. Those people might join gangs or do drugs or sleep around, but that was because, not being in the tribe, they didn't know (or rejected) what was right.

With a comparatively sedate set of close friends, this kind of illusion can last a long time, but when someone who is "of the tribe" strays, the sense of shock is extreme. How could someone who was one of us and knew it was wrong be so depraved as to sleep around? How could our people have a marriage fall apart? Or get involved in drugs? Or stop going to church?

When your sense of morality is still heavily tribal, the first few times a long-time friend violates the stronger prohibitions of that code the sense of betrayal is extreme. If "people like us" don't do those things, then clearly that friend is rejecting everything you are (and thought he was too) or he was never who you thought he was in the first place.

For me, the maturing process was coming to understand in a human, rather than an intellectual, sense the varying levels of culpability that exist, not only "outside" but within one's own tribe. And seeing that even those "following the rules" often understand them rather poorly.

While for those coming to the Church from unbelief, the difficulty may, at times, be coming to see certain acts (even those as seemingly understandable as using birth control or having sex with the person you love) can be objectively wrong in and of themselves; for those of us who grow up with "the rules" the difficulty is often going beyond understanding the difference between act and culpability to actually internalizing it. Most certainly, some acts are themselves more grave sins than others, and these should be recognized and avoided. But when the great saints accuse themselves of being horrible sinners, this is not merely a matter of excess scrupulosity. The variance in culpability is so great, that there can be those who have committed nearly "every sin in the book" who retain a certain purity of heart, and yearn for God (or, at least, The Good as they know it) while others who externally avoid all major sins can harbor a pride or hate which is no less for being expressed in petty ways rather than epic ones.

NFP and Fasting

When trying to explain the Catholic understanding of sexuality to someone "outside", I almost invariably find myself falling back on analogies relating to diet and gluttony. It's a natural comparison, and while modern society has lost any sense that it's reasonable to have any less sex if you want to have fewer children, people are able to get more righteous then ever over the point that if you want to be fit you must, must, must eat moderately and exercise more.

Indeed, diet and exercise may be the one thing relating to sexuality where modern culture understands a great deal of self denial. After all, one of the motivations for all this diet and exercise is, I think one may honestly admit, to look better while naked.

Which leaves the obvious question: Why has a Church which finds itself swimming against a quickening current in regards to its teaching on birth control nearly totally abandoned any sort of severity in regards to fasting?

Sure, we're an "Easter people" and all that, but maybe some rigorous self denial for the sake of religion would help us with some rigorous self denial for the sake of our faith. I've been pretty much as bad as the next fellow on this -- doing the mental calculation of whether I can make one more cup of coffee and still make the hour fast before mass or falling to the "I'll say some extra prayers tonight as a sacrifice instead" temptation on Fridays outside of Lent when meat is all that appears on the menu. But this is, after all, part of the problem. The constant NFP lament is "Look, we played by the rules all those years before we were married. Why does there have to be frustration now too?"

If virtue is a habit, perhaps it's time to form some more habits around denial of appetite.

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 4 & Conclusion)

[Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

NFP and the Contraceptive Mentality

In concluding this series, I'd like to address the question which originally set me on on this overly extended journey: Is it possible for users of Natural Family Planning to have a "contraceptive mentality" and if so what does that mean in the context of NFP?

I've described the contraceptive mentality as: The idea that having sex and reproducing are two activities with no necessary connection, that having sex in no way suggests a desire or willingness to have children with the person you are having sex with.

At root, I think that NFP is formulated in such a way as to be in direct opposition to the contraceptive mentality. According to an understanding of sexuality rooted in human instinct and biological reality, the way to avoid conceiving children is to not have sex. This is also the means of avoiding conception which is considered acceptable by the Church in the context of its understanding of the moral nature of sexuality. NFP is considered morally acceptable by the Church for the reason that it consists of avoiding pregnancy by not having sex, with the modern refinement of allowing the married couple to understand with a certain degree of confidence when it is that they need to avoid having sex in order to avoid conception. Rather than abstaining all the time in order to avoid pregnancy, the couple can abstain for between a quarter and half out of the woman's cycle, and achieve the same result with relative certainty.

For us as human persons, this requires a degree of self mastery over our natural instincts. The modern NFP-using married couple finds itself in a situation (well housed and fed by historical standards, healthy, and lying in bed with a member of the opposite sex with whom one would certainly not object to having conjugal relations) which would seem to scream: Have sex! Reproduce! But for various prudent reasons arrived at by human reason, they may well consider it important at a given time to overcome that instinct and abstain for a portion out of each month in order to avoid having children for a time.

However, while this use of periodic abstinence to avoid pregnancy does not necessarily involve the contraceptive mentality, indeed emphasizes quite the opposite, I think that as NFP-using couples we do find ourselves subject to the temptations of the wider culture in this regard.

The assumption which has, over the last 80+ years since the use of artificial birth control became widespread, become so basic to our culture as to be completely unspoken and unconscious, even among those of us who see ourselves as standing in opposition to it, is that a happily married husband and wife will have a "good sex life" consisting of regular marital relations, sometimes passionate or creative, sometimes comfortable and familiar, which expresses the couples love and affection for one another. Even for those of us who see fertility as a part of our marriage equal to and related to conjugal bliss, it's nearly impossible to shake the feeling of, "We're married; we should be able to do this."

Some NFP guides try to soften and direct this frustration: During the fertile part of the cycle, if you are delaying pregnancy, is a great time for date nights and cuddling and other non-sexual expressions of affection.

The message seems to be that one should somehow be able to channel all of one's desire for sex into the non-fertile periods of the cycle. You, as an NFP user can have sex whenever you want, if only you can first have the first have the self control to only want it when you can have it! And you should be able to do this, because marriage isn't just about sex. Just be organized enough to schedule the non-sexual parts of your marital relationship for the fertile parts of the wife's cycle.

I think this overly optimistic view of NFP misses a basic understanding of human nature which we ignore to our own confusion and frustration: We are as creatures designed to "want" to reproduce a good deal more than we as thinking human beings desire to, and going against our instincts in this realm requires a degree of self denial which is often experienced as frustration or unhappiness. We are unlikely to feel entirely satisfied while practicing NFP because practicing it means denying our instincts.

This is particularly hard for us in the modern world because the understanding of sex which existed before the 20th century is remote and nearly irrecoverable for us -- the understanding which saw it as something of a double-edged sword, intensely pleasurable but at the same time as potentially high in cost. If the relationships of prior centuries often seem to our modern eyes a bit distant or dour, it is in part because it is impossible for us to recover the real sense of potential cost which applied to sexual intercourse -- both because pregnancy is less risky now and because even for those who have never in their lives used contraception the idea that "we should be able to have sex" is inescapable.

I don't think that this is in any way a strike against NFP. Certainly, it makes the spacing of children easier upon a couple than not having the ability to read the signs of fertility, and I think that the reduced sense of risk or fear surrounding sex is indeed a good thing for marital relationships. However, we must at the same time understand that in seeking to apply prudence to our reproduction, and do so without use of artificial means which separate sex and reproduction, we necessarily will have to exert a degree of self control which will result in some degree of difficulty and frustration. If we deceive ourselves that such things can be achieved without difficulty, we set ourselves up for nothing but frustration and disappointment.

For those of us who reject artificial contraception, not getting pregnant requires not having sex, and not having sex means denying one's natural desires, which, as any dieter can tell you, requires self denial which is not always pleasant.

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 3)

[Continued from Part 1 and Part 2]

Enter Artificial Birth Control

In Part 2, I discussed the sense in which marriage customs and sexual morality can be seen as an adaptive response to controlling childbearing. I'd like now to turn to the question of artificial birth control.

In my first job out of college, a small chemical distribution company, I sat next to the customer service group, and thus found myself overhearing a lot of middle-aged "girl talk". One anecdote I particularly remember was recounted by a woman who'd married in the late sixties. She told about how when she and her husband were still engaged, she'd gone with her mother to a wedding, and her mother had taken occasion to whisper to her that it was generally known that the bride had "had to get married."

"I'm just so glad you're a good girl and you'll never need to get married quickly like that, my mother told me," she said. "Of course, what she didn't know is that I'd been on the pill for the last three years."

I think this does a good job of underlining a massive shift in social structure and morality which the advent of plentiful and efficient birth control allowed. The adherance to social and moral norms ("being a good girl" as the mother put it), which had previously been essential for avoiding the bearing of children out of wedlock or a hasty marriage to the father of an impending child, was now rended unnecessary by The Pill. Artificial birth control is certainly not 100% effective, but it is effective enough to allow people to separate sex and reproduction in their minds. Having sex with some given person or at some given time becomes one choice, having a baby with some given person or at some given time becomes a totally separate and unrelated choice.

This, I would argue, is the "contraceptive mentality" in its most basic form: the idea that having sex and reproducing are two activities with no necessary connection, that having sex in no way suggests a desire or willingess to have children with the person you are having sex with.

From a societal point of view, I think this puts us into a state of clear and major change. Whereas there used to be very clear biological and societal reasons to strongly pressure people not to engage in sex outside of marriage (primarily women -- there was always the double standard resulting from the fact that it is women who become pregnant) in addition to the moral reasons which we as Christians recognize, these practical and secular reasons for avoiding sex outside of stable relationships have been reduced to half-hearted (and unpersuasive) suggestions like: Wait until you are emotionally ready.

Who, after all, at such a moment is really sitting around thinking, "Oh, but perhaps I'm not emotionally ready."

Thus, when its full implications are considered, the contraceptive mentality removes virtually all of the practical reasons for seeking permanence and exclusivity in sexual relationships. And, indeed, the loss of these is pretty much what we see around us.

However, this renders us very confused creatures. As biological creatures, we still have the physical pleasures and instinctual emotional ties associated with sex which developed because of its reproductive function. And yet most of us do not think of sex as being reproductive. The fact that natural incentive and natural effects have been so totally disengaged must have a major effect on us -- and the fact that sex is something both so attractive and so essential to the relationships which are the building blocks and perpetuators of society means that the imbalance resulting from this de-coupling of incentive and effect will reverberate throughout society in major ways.

[to be continued: Part 4]

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 2)

[Continued from Part 1]

Restraint, Relationships and Planning Parenthood

When I say that we "naturally want to avoid having children" at certain times, I would imagine that the image that comes immediately to mind is of birth control, abortion or infanticide, and most traditional societies have seen these in some form or other. However, I'd like to turn our attention to something so basic and so prevalent that we don't think about it much.

From an anthropological point of view, the entire structure of our romantic and family relationships serves as a way to control childbearing, limitting it to situations in which offspring can be supported. Consider: Requiring that young women remain virgins until marriage ensured that children will not be born without a provider. Nor was the decision to marry, when it came, a strictly individual affair. Marriage was negotiated and approved by the wider families, because the families were in effect committing to help support the new family unit being created. Many cultures also required the husband's family to pay a "bride price", not simpy as compensation for the lost contribution of the daughter to her own family, but as proof that the husband was of sufficient means to start a family.

Once in place, this set of cultural mores and laws provided an easy way to adjust to want or plenty: In good times, people married young, in bad they married late and some did not marry at all. Within a marriage, the strong cultural ideal of the faithful wife ensured that if husband and wife avoided intercourse to space children the husband would not find some other male getting his genes in on the sly, while the cultural rules surrounding legitimacy assured the wife that even if her husband was unfaithful during such a time, any children resulting would not supplant hers in terms of inheritance or prestige.

A dramatic example of the extent to which marriage age was used to manage fertility can be seen in Wrigley's Population History of England, which makes a strong case that the English population explosion in the mid eighteenth century through the early twentieth was a result of a decline of in the average age of first marriage for women from 26 to 23. (This, coming at the same time as increased life expectancy caused the population to grow dramatically, and triggered a round of Malthusian worrying by the cultural elites.)

With marriage choices as the primary means of regulating reproduction, the other key factor, in addition to marriageable age, was the number of people who never married. In Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, 10-25% of women never married. In poorer countries such as Ireland, both late marriage and spinsterhood came into play with the result that as few as 30% of the women of childbearing age were married at any given time. (Comprehensive demographic data here. Example table of percentage of women of childbearing age married by country and decade available on page 21 of this paper.)

What we see when we view demographic history is that marriage (and chastity outside of marriage) is an adaptive trait which allows us as rational creatures to regulate our fertility. The fact that the signs of female fertility are hard to discern means that any sexual act with a woman of childbearing age may result in the creation of a child. And the set of moral and societal norms surrounding marriage provide us with a way to manage that fact responsibly in order to have children only when we believe we can support them. This evolutionary analysis actually leads to a definition of marriage which is startlingly similar to a traditional Christian understanding of marriage: In both cases one of the primary ends of marriage is to assure that children come into being only when others are prepared to love and care for them.

[to be continued: Part 3]

Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 1)

If you move in conservative Catholic circles much, you have doubtless heard the phrase "contraceptive mentality". Though used frequently and negatively, I think there is value in delving a bit more deeply into what we mean by the phrase. I was moved to write this in semi-response to an interesting post by Brett Salkeld a couple months back which sought to explore the bounds of what a "contraceptive mentality" is. Another good resource on the topic is this post at Catholic Culture on the contraceptive mentality.

While recognizing the dangers of trying to be too wide ranging in subject matter in the limited space of a blog post, my goal here is to set out answers to the following:

• What is a "contraceptive mentality"?


• How is a contraceptive mentality contrary to how humans are "meant" to function morally and sexually?


• How, if at all, does NFP (natural family planning) relate to a contraceptive mentality?

I think it's easiest to think about the idea of a contraceptive mentality against the backdrop of how we function sexually as human creatures -- a term I use advisedly in that I want to emphasize our rootedness in a certain biological reality of being primates with certain biological systems and instincts, while at the same time not ignoring our rational, emotional and moral sensibilities in the sense that "human animal" strikes me as implying.

Uncertainty and Conception

One thing that sets us apart from most other higher primates is that humans have fairly even sexual drive all of the time. Or, at least, men have sexual drive pretty much all of the time. Women seem to have more variation in their level of interest, and indeed there is a fair amount of evidence that one driving (though unconscious) element of their drive is that they are more "in the mood" during the times of the month when they are fertile than when they are not. Another thing that sets us apart from most other higher primates is that a woman's fertility is not marked by unmistakable physical signs (change of color and swelling of the genital area, changes in smell, etc.) (Though Bonobos have often been compared to humans in regards to their relatively constant sex drive, they are like chimps in that female fertility is readily apparent through external signs.)

Thinking about humans naturalistically, this makes a fair amount of sense from an evolutionary point of view. The exceptionally long period it takes for human offspring to reach maturity, and the importance of learning social/cultural patterns in order to function maturely as a human, makes rearing by stable family groups highly desirable. Other higher primates, with their visually obvious mating periods, do not tend to form strong pair-bonds between mates. Indeed, quite the contrary: because a female's fertility is obvious to all males, the tendency among chimps, gorillas, etc., is for any adult male who can get within reach of her to try to get his genes into play. There are a number of different approaches a male primate may use in order to try to assure he is the one who succeeds in fathering a child on her, but there's a fair amount of competition and free-for-all involved. For humans, since it isn't immediately obvious when a woman is fertile, a male stands the best chance of passing on his genes by forming a longer term, exclusive relationship, since it's only by having relations consistently over at least a month (and knowing that other males have not succeeded in getting in on the action) that he can have reasonable assurance of being the father of any offspring. Take this relative exclusivity out into years instead of months (with the incentive of successfully fathering multiple offspring) and you've solved the problem of having both parents around to help rear offspring which take a long time to mature.

Evolutionarily speaking, there are differing incentives for men and women, which can be used to sketch different stories about men's and women's sexual drives and instincts. But I don't think it's overly controversial to assert that a compromise which suits both sets of drives well is found in monogamy, serial monogamy or polygamy -- relationship dynamics which are exclusive and stable, though not necessarily equal. (As the prevalence of polygamy in many cultures illustrates -- there's nothing but upside for a male from an evolutionary point of view if he can have exclusive access to multiple women rather than just one.)

All of which is a long way of coming around to this basic point: Uncertainty about when conception can result from intercourse is a factor which has been central to shaping the development of human sexual and relationship dynamics throughout the existence of our species.

Evolution vs. Responsible Parenthood

The above discussion should immediately bring to mind a contrast between our modern attitudes toward reproduction and what in anthropomorphic terms we might term evolution's "motivation": A host of messages in our modern society tell us that we should limit the number of children that we have, while "evolutionary success" is based upon the number of grandchildren one has who survive to reproduce. Thus, while the instincts and physical characteristics of most animals seem centered on maximizing the number of offspring, those of us in modern society tend to focus on not having more children than we plan on (and often plan on few.)

It's common for Christians of a ruralist tenor to attribute this to modern industrial society, asserting that in an agricultural society children are an asset while in an industrial society they are a liability. I think, however, this is the result of simplistic thinking. I would propose that, ever since we became aware, humans have always sought some degree of "responsible parenthood", though it's true that the cultures of many modern developed nations are much more biased against childbearing than most throughout history. Still, even in societies in which large numbers of children were described invariably as a blessing, we as humans have, because we are conscious and see death and deprivation as evils, always sought to have the "right" number of children for a given time and place.

Evolution is a process which optimizes the success of populations, not of individuals. As such, it is evolutionarily advantageous for members of a population to produce more offspring than their environment is easily able to sustain. This achieves several advantages: More individuals means more genetic variation, thus providing a larger chance for the development of advantageous new traits. Large numbers of individuals also protect against unforeseen catastrophes and provide individuals able to exploit unforeseen opportunities (new niches, migration, competition, etc.) If available resources prove not to be enough, the least fit individuals will die off, which for the genetic population as a whole is also generally beneficial.

However, we as conscious and moral beings obviously don't want to see people suffering for lack of food or other necessities. However advantageous it might be for the population, we don't want to see people suffering for lack of basic resources. And so we naturally want to avoid having children at times when we think we cannot support them.

[to be continued]

Part 2

Talking About Sinful Lifestyles With Children

Eric Brown wrote a post about the question of whether children of same-sex-couples should be allowed in Catholic schools the other day, which generated some interesting conversation. One of the problems that lies at the root of this controversy, I think, is the question of how to deal sinful lifestyles when talking to your children.

Obviously, one of the duties of a conscientious Catholic parents is to successfully pass on to their children belief in Catholic moral teaching. We believe, after all, that living according to the Church's moral teachings is key to both the happiness and salvation of our children, and both of these are things we ought to care about a good bit.

This much, at least, is widely agreed upon. Why, however, should that be a reason not to want your children exposed to the children of a same-sex-couple? Isn't that simply a great chance to talk about the Church's teachings about marriage and sexual morality?

Frankly, I (and I think many other Catholic parents) would rather not have to rush that one. Why?

Both thinking back to my own childhood and also about my children (currently ages 8 through 1.5) one of the things that stands out to me very clearly is that children are naturally dualistic. There's a reason why the fairy tale is a genre so enjoyed by children -- children like clear heroes and villains. The adult my be interested in why it is that the wicked witch became wicked, and whether she really thought she was wicked, but to a child, the fact that she is wicked is all they need. Heroes do good things, villains to bad things, and children under the age of 10-12 have a great deal of difficulty seeing people in between.

This is one of the reasons why my wife and I are very careful about what books and movies we expose our children to: Once someone is "the good guy", everything he does is admired and imitated. The flawed hero is not something that children are good at understanding. You see this when children interact with their real life friends as well. The girl down the street who is a "best friend" one day is "that mean girl I just hate, hate, hate" when she offends.

Thus, when I seek to keep my children from running into certain types of sins (divorce and remarriage, adultery, fornication, homosexual relationships) it's not so much because I don't want to explain these sins to my children, though that's part of it. It's more because I'd rather not have to deal with the delicate balancing act of trying to explain the "hate the sin, love the sinner" concept to a mind which is little capable of making the distinction.

"Daddy, there's a new girl in RE class named Heather. Instead of a mommy and a daddy, she has two mommies. How does she have two mommies?"

"Well, Virginia, only a man and a woman can make a baby together, that's how God made us. Miss Jennifer and Miss Jean may have adopted Heather, or maybe one of them had Heather before they met each other."

"But are Miss Jennifer and Miss Jean married?"

"No, women can't be married to each other. It would be very wrong for two women to live together as if they were married. God tells us that only men and women can marry because only men and women can have babies together. But some women try to live together as if they were married anyway."

"Oh."

* * * *

"Daddy, I told Heather that her mommies are not really married and she cried. Then she said I was a big liar. And one of the boys asked her if she was a dipe. What's a dipe?"

"I think the boy was trying to say a very mean word, and I don't think that you should use that word, Virginia. It was very mean of the boy to say that to her."

"But why did she say I was a liar? Her mommies aren't married. You said so. They can't be."

"Sometimes people don't like to hear things even if they are true, honey. Maybe it's better if you don't talk to Heather about her mommies."

"Oh."

* * * *

"Daddy, I asked one of Heather's mommies, Miss Jennifer, if she was really married, and she said she was! Then I told her you said God didn't like that and she said you must be judge-mental. Are you judge-mental, Daddy?"

"Not everyone understands what God tells us about marriage, Virginia. When Miss Jennifer said I was judgmental, she meant that she disagreed with what God tells us about marriage."

"Miss Jennifer said that God made some women so that they love each other, and so God means them to get married. Is that true, Daddy?"

"No, dear. Miss Jennifer is wrong."

Yes, it could be done, but no sane parent wants to get into these situations.

It's not a teaching opportunity, teaching only works well with people able to understand. It's an aggravation and confusion opportunity. Children have three modes when dealing with these situations: Assuming something is okay because the person in question seems nice; deciding to loudly despise the person because "he's bad"; and pestering all people involved with awkward questions. Since none of these are desirable, parents would prefer not to have to deal with the "two mommies" kind of problems unless family connection forces them to. Just as they'd rather not delve into the fact that the nice woman named Phyllis who comes to family functions with Uncle Edgar is not actually his wife, and will fail to draw a "teaching moment" from the fact that Aunt Belinda's oldest child was born two months after she got married.

Of course, family connections often result in children being forcibly exposed to sex out of wedlock, divorce, adultery, etc. But at least in my own experience, when these realities do in fact make themselves known to children the results are usually less than illuminating. Children are inveterate side takers, and if they do not (as they are surprisingly able to do) remain blithely unaware of a situation going on before their very eyes, they will tend to be the ones who say hurtful things loudly at gatherings which leave all the adults glaring at each other.

And if it's difficult to explain to children about a nasty divorce without the children deciding they need to make their moral indignation known by behaving badly in public toward one of the parties, it is that much harder to explain a situation to a child in which the sinners are apparently happy and united in their sin. If one makes a big deal of it, the child is likely to take things to far and attempt to do a little of their own evangelizing (with disastrous results.) If one is circumspect, the child will assume this is just fine, and is unlikely to believe you years later when you attempt to explain that such things are wrong.

While it may seem like singling out homosexuals for special scorn, the "same sex marriage" is perhaps the most difficult lifestyle sin to explain to children. Divorce, because it fractures a family, is naturally disliked by children. Adultery, if it somehow becomes known, will be so only in its home-breaking sense, and thus rejected similarly to divorce. Same sex marriage, however, is unique in claiming to be a marriage when it is not. And thus is by far the most difficult to explain to children. I don't think it's unjustified for parents, who care strongly about presenting a good example of what marriage really is to their children, to not want to have such an issue brought up to their children before the children are of sufficient mental and moral maturity to be able to understand the situation and the Church's response to it.

The Sex Life Fallacy

[This is a re-post of a post from back in 2007, as prelude to developing some further thoughts on the topic.]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a bit about bonobos, the "sexy ape" which is sometimes referred to as the kinder, gentler counterpart to the sometimes violent chimps. A commenter later pointed out an article written by primatologist Fraans de Waal in the eSkeptic (an organ of the Skeptics Society) taking exception to the New Yorker article which inspired my post, in which article he was presented as something of an outlier, reaching exciting but perhaps somewhat exaggerated conclusions based on research only on bonobos in captivity.

It seems that Dinesh D'Souza had written a blog post based on the New Yorker article, and this had pretty much convinced de Waal that the entire thing was a conservative attempt to co opt discussion of his "sexy" apes. The Skeptics brought their own ax to grind to the table, remarking in an editorial note, "it is interesting that so many people wish to deny the undeniable relationship between humans and chimps, and at the same time cannot seem to help finding political meanings in primate behavior that supports either a liberal or conservative agenda."

The de Waal article is marginally worth reading, but it strikes me that in his overall defensiveness (perhaps a combination of his less than flattering treatment in the original article and the fact that D'Souza, whom he clearly despises, picked up the story) leads him to engage in some poor rhetorical moves.

For instance, he says that all the examples of purported violence among bonobos are from captivity, and yet two of the examples in the article are recounted by Hohmann as having occurred in the wild.

On another occasion, he dispenses with what strikes me as a legitimate question as to whether or not all of the activity between bonobos which is usually described as group sexual activity for social bonding purposes is actually sexual (as in, whether the bonobos are relating to each other sexually, or just touching each other in what to humans would be sexual ways) by quoting the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones case. Clearly, that's not answering the question as to whether actions which would be sexual among humans actually carry that connotation among bonobos, and it's unfortunate to see that kind of unseriousness in response to what struck me as a pretty balanced, well researched article.

However, all this talk about whether the "hippie primate" who "makes love not war" is indeed the sort of gentle, oversexed creature that it is reputed to be got me thinking about the whole question of a "sex life".

You see, the thing that makes bonobos seem a bit unusual compared to many other animals is their tendency to engage in mating behaviors when not "in heat". While a tiny bit of this has been observed in chimps, chimp males are usually only interested in females when the females undergo the physical changes that indicate they're fertile.

In this sense, one of the things that has excited people about bonobos is that they seem to be interested in sex all the time -- just like many humans. While those of us who use NFP often note that Topic A becomes a bit more compelling during fertile periods, the signs of fertility are not widely observable among humans, and as a species we're pretty open to mating behavior at all times (headaches aside).

It's pretty common in popular culture these days to talk about the necessity of a "good sex life", a somewhat vague term which I take to mean having the openness and opportunity to have sex fairly often and enjoy it a lot. Well, that sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? And here's the bonobo to show that it's not just a human thing, it's a way that primates can get along and relieve tension so they don't fight all the time.

This fits pretty well with the human-as-mental-creature picture which has dominated our intellectual landscape since the Enlightenment. Here we've got this great thing we can do that forms close personal relationships and is a lot of fun as well. Shouldn't we all make sure to fit regular practice of it into our schedules?

Sounds like fun, but I think it fails to take into account our existence as physical creatures with biological systems that have specific purposes. There's a reason why they call them "reproductive organs", and it doesn't have to do with xeroxing.

Now this works out fine for creatures like the bonobos. Most species have a pretty scattershot approach to keeping the species going: every time you have the chance to conceive, you do; and if there isn't enough food or parental care to go around, the child dies. Most animals, left to their own devices, will get pregnant just about as often as their bodies and nutrition will let them. Pop 'em out, let 'em go.

However modern, first world, human society has managed to work itself in expected pregnancy to be very rare (and never to come unexpectedly) at exactly the same time it's decided that everyone needs a healthy and active sex life. Basically, we want to mate like bonobos, but not have every female going around the jungle either pregnant or with a small baby clinging to her back.

Modern birth control (and abortion) has made this possible to an extent, but holding mother nature in check with technology tends to add other complicating factors. It seems moderately hard-wired in humans for sex to create emotional pair-bonding, of the sort that you need between a pair of mates raising offspring that take 13-17 years to reach biological (much less intellectual) maturity. Taking the reproduction out of sex reduces the need for pairbonding, and so we provide ourselves with all sorts of ways to make ourselves unhappy why pursuing the "sex life" ideal.

I'm not saying that biological realities mean that sex should simply be a matter of closing ones eyes and thinking of England (though a vacation sounds like a good idea now that you mention it), but it seems to me that from a creature point of view we put ourselves into awkward places when we try to focus on having a "sex life" without admitting that we're really talking about a "reproductive life".

A Few Thoughts on NFP

Sometimes you run across an argument which strikes you as wrong in such a way as to crystallize and clarify your thinking on a topic. Such a case, for me, was running into this debate from last week at InsideCatholic on the topic, "Is NFP Misogynous?"

The "yes it is" argument contained the following key elements:

Assuming any methodized sexual intercourse devised to avoid pregnancy by an otherwise open-to-life-marital-couple can actually "work," who bears responsibility for the method? I seriously question whether NFP, for many, isn't a misogynous practice -- imposing upon women an undue share of the physical and emotional burden of the theologically questionable quest of planning pregnancy.

First, we must be real. Modern NFP practices demand daily bodily measurements of women, not men.... A woman most desires sexual intimacy when she is at her most fertile.... This is also the moment when we are most likely to conceive a child. It's the moment NFP-practicing women measure and chart and predict as "fertility awareness," a "maybe-child" zone. For NFP-practicing women avoiding pregnancy, it is the moment they must say "no" to both themselves and their spouses....

I don't buy it. It sounds like a scheme to impose on women who wish to time pregnancies an almost penal practice of self-measurement, self-control, and self-denial, while requiring, at a minimum, a sort of suffering acquiescence from a spouse whose interest in the chart becomes rather strategic....

NFP needs to go the same way as the rhythm method -- which did not "work" and was, more importantly, female unfriendly. In its place, perhaps we all need to suck it up and admit what the theology asks of us: Have sex whenever you both want to... and expect a baby every time. Otherwise, don't copulate. That's a fair burden on both spouses.

The woman presenting the "no it isn't" view did a perfectly decent job of presenting the standard arguments for NFP, but I'd like to dig into one aspect in particular, especially given that by the sixth comment on the article we already see a theology student trying to argue that the "planning" involved in Natural Family Planning is really no different than the use of barrier methods of contraception since it involves "the intention of having sex without baby" and is thus "using one's intellect to create a tool which limits the possibility of procreation".

I'd like to start from a point of biological realism. The bodily organs which are used in this very pleasant thing we call sex are part of the reproductive system, which means than whenever we have sex we are performing an action which is at a biological level meant to be reproductive, in the sense that our bodies would not have this capacity were it not for the fact their function is reproductive in nature. (Interesting side note: think of all the most pleasurable things the human body can do and ask yourself, how does each one of these relate to a basic element of human survival. Generally speaking, the greater the physical pleasure, the greater the relation to survival.)

Within the overall structure of intercourse, a normal, healthy man is capable of begetting children any time he has sex. However, women (like females of virtually all other mammals) are only biologically able to conceive a few days out of the month. (Both of these reproductive strategies make a lot of sense for the individual and the species as a whole at the evolutionary level, but I don't think it's necessary to go into all that here.) Even at the "right time", a woman may or may not conceive as the result of having intercourse. Conditions have to be right for the sperm to reach the egg, the egg has to be healthy, and the sperm has to successfully implant. What this boils down to is that while the probability of getting pregnant from any one random act of intercourse is perhaps 1-10% depending on the people involved, having sex frequently will almost invariably result in pregnancy unless there is a health/age problem involved.

Other creatures, our non-rational brethren in the animal kingdom, do not worry about when they should not reproduce. Driven by instincts and natural compulsions, they mate when it is their season, have as many offspring as they can, and hope (if one may apply that word to the unthinking) that those offspring will thrive. If there are not enough resources to go around, the young, weak, and old die off. We humans see this kind of suffering as something to be avoided, and so human societies in all times and places have striven not to outgrow their resources -- using methods ranging from self denial to slaughter.

From a Catholic point of view, human life is sacred and thus abortion and infanticide are completely unacceptable as means of population control; and the sexual faculties have a moral integrity resulting from their relation to the creation of new human beings and so the sex act should not be modified (as with birth control) to remove its inherent fertility. Thus, for Catholics, the answer to the need not to have more children than one can provide for is to have sex less. Because sex has a clear and inherent reproductive aspect, which we consider it wrong to try to circumvent artificially, if you want to not get pregnant you will have to avoid having sex at least some of the time.

Now, this is where the question of whether Natural Family Planning (NFP) as practiced by modern Catholic couples is "natural" comes in. The woman's body gives certain signs of when it is likely to be fertile. These signs are rather less obvious than those of many of our fellow mammals. Female chips, for instance, have a large pink swelling around their genital area when they become fertile, such that one can tell if she is fertile from quite some distance away.

Signs of human female fertility are much more subtle. (The evolutionary reason for this would make a very interesting inquiry, I can think of a few very interesting reasons.) However they are now pretty well understood and easily learned.

So, what are the options for the Catholic couple who are seeking to remain true to the Church's understanding of human sexuality and the human person and also seeking to avoid having more children then they can raise and support?

Ms. Campbell advises, "Have sex whenever you both want to... and expect a baby every time. Otherwise, don't copulate. That's a fair burden on both spouses."

The thing is (leaving aside the dangerous problem of trying to figure out what is "fair" for both spouses in some sort of power politics sense) that this is in a sense not actually all that natural. We are not made such that sex results in a baby "every time". Sex is somewhat likely to result in a baby perhaps 30% of the time, and highly likely to do so only about 10% of the time at best. Since unlike a lot of our fellow creatures, our sex drives are not only "on" when we're fertile, the rest of the time sex serves to strengthen and deepen the bond between a couple who are going to have a lot of work and difficulty together raising children. So if you only, ever have sex when you absolutely expect to have a baby, you're actually using sex in a more minimal fashion than we're physically designed for.

If they know anything at all about their biology (from experience if nothing else) a couple is going to know they won't get pregnant every time. And knowing this, the drive is strong to say, "Surely this time is okay." Though husbands should try hard to be sensitive to the greater difficulties that pregnancy means for their wives than for them, this line of thinking is naturally going to appeal more to the man than to the woman. Desires for "fairness" aside, pregnancy is naturally going to effect the woman more directly than the man.

Given that we have the understanding of female fertility signs available to us quite easily in the modern world, it is going to cause significantly less stress without couples to use that knowledge to actually know "we might get pregnant now" versus "we almost certainly won't get pregnant now" rather than relying the more more amorphous "chances are decent we won't get pregnant this one time" or the inaccurate "we shouldn't have sex unless we're absolutely sure we want to get pregnant."

NFP works within the natural structure of what sex is -- a natural act which has both unitive and procreative elements. It encompasses self denial in that it accepts that if you want to avoid pregnancy for a while you are going to have to forgo having sex, but it provides system and achievability to that self denial by telling a couple when it is that they need to forgo sex. If you need to avoid having another child for the next year or two, you may end up having to avoid having sex nearly half the time. However, that is much more achievable and healthy for a couple than attempting to avoid it entirely for those same years -- and the differentials of fear and desire that would result from such an attempt.

Philosophy and Health

Philosophy is often seen as one of those highly impractical, strictly academic fields, and yet, it has a way of being at the root of everything.

I was struck, recently, by a contrast in two statements about medicine. In an article about the importance of finding medical ways to enhance female sex drive, I ran across a claim along the lines of, "Many experts believe that more than 50% of women over 30 suffer abnormally low interest in sex and would benefit from sexual drive enhancing medication if it became available." The immediate connection my mind made was: No more than 5% of the population is attracted primarily to his or her own sex, and yet this is not considered a medical abnormality.

These two together show that the medical community (and our society in general) clearly has some sort of philosophy of the human person and philosophy of sexuality, which is doubtless assumed and unstated. Women, it is believed, ought to have a sexual drive equal to that of men, regardless of whether that is what we find in nature or not. (Even though there are some obvious evolutionary reasons why males would be physically more interested in frequency of copulation than females.) And yet if one primarily experiences sexual attraction to one's own sex, even though that both "doesn't fit the plumbing" and is evolutionarily useless, that is perfectly fine and healthy, even if this is a condition found in only a small percentage of the population.

Medicine is, in its modern form, generally an empirical field. Yet the question of "What is normal?" and "What is abnormal?" is a question that we always answer philosophically rather than empirically.

Necessarily so. Often our sense of what "ought" to happen is directly contrary to the observed usual occurrence. "Health" is not simply what we observe to be the usual, otherwise we would consider the "healthy" result of a diagnosis of lymphoma to be death.

We chase the telos just as much as in Aristotle's time, and yet we do not acknowledge that what we are doing is anything other than an "empirical science".

Empirical Methodology vs. Human Nature

Sorry to be naught but a linker this week, but things have been busy...

This New York Times Magazine article, interviewing three female researchers studying female desire, struck me as an interesting example of how scientific methodologies are of limited use in describing the human person. Many of their conclusions and ideas are interesting, and you can see how they reflect lived experience to a limited extent, but the fruits of all this research are also startlingly inadequate in describing something as universally experienced as human love and sexuality. And necessarily so, I would tend to think.

Researcher Ravages Virginity Pledges

This was originally going to be a post about how stupid or ideological reporters took a study and drew unreasonable conclusions about it. Then I read the original study and realized it was actually a case of a researcher trying to draw conclusions that do not even remotely follow from the results of her study.

It seems that Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University did a study entitled, "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," which was published in the January 1st edition of Pediatrics..

The methodology was to compare teenagers who took virginity pledges with teenagers who were similar in all other respects (religiosity, family life, attitudes towards sex, etc.) but did not take the pledges.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS. The subjects for this study were National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health respondents, a nationally representative sample of middle and high school students who, when surveyed in 1995, had never had sex or taken a virginity pledge and who were >15 years of age (n = 3440). Adolescents who reported taking a virginity pledge on the 1996 survey (n = 289) were matched with nonpledgers (n = 645) by using exact and nearest-neighbor matching within propensity score calipers on factors including prepledge religiosity and attitudes toward sex and birth control. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers were compared 5 years after the pledge on self-reported sexual behaviors and positive test results for Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Trichomonas vaginalis, and safe sex outside of marriage by use of birth control and condoms in the past year and at last sex.

RESULTS. Five years after the pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and anal and oral sex variables. Pledgers had 0.1 fewer past-year partners but did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers used birth control and condoms in the past year and birth control at last sex.

CONCLUSIONS. The sexual behavior of virginity pledgers does not differ from that of closely matched nonpledgers, and pledgers are less likely to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease before marriage. Virginity pledges may not affect sexual behavior but may decrease the likelihood of taking precautions during sex. Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially virginity pledgers.

Watch the slight of hand here: Previous studies had showed that people who take virginity pledges delay sex longer and have fewer partners, statistically, than those who don't. However those who take virginity pledges are generally much more religious, come from stabler and more religious families, and have more negative attitudes towards premarital sex and birth control than the general population. So this study takes those who have taken virginity pledges and compares their outcomes to people with the same levels of religiosity, family support, and sexual attitudes -- and (surprise, surprise) finds that people who take virginity pledges and those who share their beliefs and lifestyles but haven't taken pledges have very similar outcomes. The piece of paper itself does not prevent premarital sex! Who would have thought?

Now the study author has a point that whereas the number of virginity pledges signed is often taken as a measure of success for abstinence-based programs, it could well be that these programs are simply making more measurable a segment of the population who are already showing a higher than average propensity to delay sex till marriage. Of those in the study who had taken virginity pledges or who had similar characteristics to those who had, roughly 55% had had pre-marital sex by around age 25. By comparison, a 2002 survey found that 75% of all Americans have had premarital sex by age 20. (There's some fuzziness here in that from the working I think the data in the Pediatrics study may only be the pre-marital sex rate for those who are unmarried -- but I would assume that the pre-marital sex rate for those who are married would not necessarily be higher than for those unmarried so I'm assuming that the statistic holds.)

The real question one should ask, if trying to judge the worth of abstinence based sex ed programs in schools, is whether these programs create a larger demographic of young people who have the characteristics of the pledge takers -- or at least reduce defection rates among those who already have those characteristics -- not whether the piece of paper itself is instrumental in keeping people from having sex. This study does nothing to show whether abstinence based programs increase or decrease the number of students with the cultural characteristics that would assist in saving sex for marriage. Indeed, as constituted, the study doesn't really produce any interesting or useful results at all.

My guess, if someone were to ask, is that public school abstinence programs do not actually achieve much of anything (indeed, the evidence is that no kind of sex ed works) because the principles of cultural and religious impartiality at play in our modern public school system preclude giving students much support in developing a worldview in which saving sex for marriage would seem a worthwhile endeavour. However, one would have to conduct a different study to prove that.

Sex Ed Does Not Work

Several times -- when I have observed that I know from my own experience that if one simply does not have sex until getting married, one will in the normal course of things successfully avoid STDs and unplanned pregnancies -- I have had quoted to me the "well known fact" that abstinence only sex education does not work. A quick browse around for studies showed several solid ones, including one commissioned by congress and the Department of Health and Human Services. These all showed that rates of sexual activity, pregnancy and STD infection were not decreased by "abstinence only" sex ed programs.

This didn't really seem like a surprise to me. That a school makes kids sit through several years worth of classes which emphasize that they should wait until marriage to have sex does not by any means mean that the students themselves will resolve to follow that course of action. Heck, schools try hard to teach history, reading, math and science, and students often don't absorb those lessons either -- despite the fact that there is nothing but upside to knowing about those subjects. One must assume that students will be even more unlikely to absorb lessons about abstinence -- since that involves "not getting any" and being something of a social oddity.

I and a number of my peers avoided sex until marriage, but that's because within our particular sub-culture of orthodox Catholics there was a strong reason not to -- something called "mortal sin" that we all believed in. If I had not believed that it was a mortal sin to have sex before marriage, and belong to a peer group that strongly supported that belief, it seems highly unlikely that I would have followed that course. MrsDarwin and I had been dating for nearly four years by the time we were finally able to get married. If we hadn't had a very, very strong motivation to wait -- then why do it?

So I'd essentially figured that the reason why abstinence education "didn't work" was because most of the kids were just sitting there in class thinking "this is stupid" and didn't make any particular effort to be abstinent.

I continue to think I'm right on that, but I ran across a post by Megan McArdle who pointed out something that I hadn't noticed: The most comprehensive recent controlled study to date, the one commissioned by the DHHS, found that groups of student put through several years of one of four commonly used abstinence-only programs did not abstain from sex (or get pregnant or get STDs) at different rates from those in the "control" groups. In two of the studied school districts, the control group was receiving only a "health and science" class which provided little to no information on contraception and STDs. In the other two districts, the control group received a fairly comprehensive sex ed program centering on contraception.

In all four districts, there was no significant difference between the students getting abstinence-only education and those in the control group.

What that means is not just that "abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work", it means that neither form of sex education significantly changes the way teenagers behave. There might as well be no sex education at all -- which to my mind would be just fine. This is one of those areas in which any particular approach to teaching on the topic is going to go against the sensibilities of at least some parents. And results like these only serve to underline that there are some areas which public schools (or indeed schools in general) simply don't have much ability to change behavior. This is one of for the parents and culture, not the schools.

The Pill and Mate Selection

This has been bouncing around the Catholic blogsphere due to being picked up by the blog at First Things, but I post it here in hopes of perhaps drawing a comment out of Razib or someone else with some more serious biological knowledge. It would seem that evolutionary psychologist Stewart Craig Roberts has a paper coming out in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences in which he presents data that women show different odor-based preferences in regards to men when they are pregnant and when they are on The Pill (which uses hormones to reproduce some effects of pregnancy, thus surpressing ovulation.)

While several factors can send a woman swooning, including big brains and brawn, body odor can be critical in the final decision, the researchers say. That's because beneath a woman's flowery fragrance or a guy's musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.

MHC genes churn out substances that tell the body whether a cell is a native or an invader. When individuals with different MHC genes mate, their offspring's immune systems can recognize a broader range of foreign cells, making them more fit.

Past studies have suggested couples with dissimilar MHC genes are more satisfied and more likely to be faithful to a mate. And the opposite is also true with matchng-MHC couples showing less satisfaction and more wandering eyes.

"Not only could MHC-similarity in couples lead to fertility problems," said lead researcher Stewart Craig Roberts, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle in England, "but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners."

The study involved about 100 women, aged 18 to 35, who chose which of six male body-odor samples they preferred. They were tested at the start of the study when none of the participants were taking contraceptive pills and three months later after 40 of the women had started taking the pill more than two months prior.

For the non-pill users, results didn't show a significant preference for similar or dissimilar MHC odors. When women started taking birth control, their odor preferences changed. These women were much more likely than non-pill users to prefer MHC-similar odors.

"The results showed that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odors," Roberts said....

"When women are pregnant there's no selection pressure, evolutionarily speaking, for having a preference for genetically dissimilar odors," Roberts said. "And if there is any pressure at all it would be towards relatives, who would be more genetically similar, because the relatives would help those individuals rear the baby."

So the pill puts a woman's body into a post-mating state, even though she might be still in the game.

”The pill is in effect mirroring a natural shift but at an inappropriate time,” Roberts told LiveScience.

Obviously this is just one factor in relationship dynamics, but it does strike me as interesting in that it seems http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifto me that birth control is a fairly culturally disruptive technology which generally speaking was taken up without a whole lot of thought about anything other than the obvious benefits.

It's also an example of the ways in which things we don't think of affect our feelings and actions. No one, I'm sure, would think, "Boy, my boyfriend just doesn't smell alluring anymore." (Unless, perhaps, she was about to tell him to go take a shower rather than plopping down on the couch next to her after returning from the gym.) But a thought of, "He just doesn't seem exciting anymore" or "We just don't seem to have a spark these days" might well include a response to senses that we do not actively think about.

UPDATE: Razib puts up a good post on the question here. And provides a link to the original study here.

Worth noting is the confluence of interests that gives this story so much play. In the mainstream press, it's a quirky result about something which nearly everyone takes -- probably good mostly for a laugh. "Hey, did you hear the one about how your girlfriend is more likely to dump you for her brother when she's on the pill?"

Meanwhile, in the small subculture of those who have rejected birth control, it serves as a bit of an "I told you so".

In the end, it strikes me as a bit interesting -- more as an example of how a physical reaction can unconsciously affect our personal choices than as a proof that women on the pill will form bad relationships. (After all, there's nothing that would necessarily make a relationship with someone who happened to have a more similar immunity profile a "bad relationship".) Much more concerning, if one is listing off reasons to be cautious of the wide use of birth control, is that having fertility be strictly optional removes the biological incentive from a lot of ancient social structures that we pretty much take for granted, and don't want to see go away.